Walker Evans’ portrait of Ellie Mae Burroughs, an
Alabama tenant farmer’s wife, is one of the greatest images in American
art. In a new ebook essay, Jerry L. Thompson explains how the photograph
happened and why it still resonates today.
From a piece in the Daily Beast...
“He could control the darkness of
the shadows collecting in Ellie Mae’s eye sockets and under her chin,
but he could not control how she reacted to a large camera being placed
so closely to her face. He could not control the pattern of lines
beginning to etch themselves into the skin of that young face. He could
not control, but only watch, the play of eye tension and mouth tension
on that face as he waited for the right instant to click the shutter.
And apparently he could not control the length of his close contact with
her: he exposed only four sheets of film.” A few lines later, Thompson
puts it more bluntly: “Evans took the pictures, but he didn’t make them
by himself; he and Ellie Mae made them together, as a collaboration.”
Evans
kept two subtly different images from that encounter. The photograph
that found its way into the suite of pictures that opens Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
shows a worried, quizzical woman. The other image, where she allows
herself the ghost of a smile—paradoxically, it seems the sadder of the
two pictures—Evans included in American Photographs, the seminal
catalog of his 1938 one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art, the first
such show ever granted a single photographer by that museum. One of the
pictures is taken with flash, and one without. At the time, the
technological requirements of using flash with the Deardorff would have
meant that Evans had to move very quickly and surely to change
strategies on the spur of the moment. The results are two photographs
that are similar but different, and different enough to make both of
them keepers. An artist may not know what he’s after, but he knows when
he’s got it.
